Angie’s brain whirled. She owed Claire. She’d dealt her cards by opening this door in error. She now had to play her hand and play it well. And carefully.
“Look, there’s no easy way to soften this, Claire, and it’s really not my place to tell you.” She hesitated. “But you’re probably going to hear it from someone in town one day, probably sooner than later now, because a lot of people know about it.” Angie cleared her throat. “When your uncle Axel was thirteen years old, he was gang-raped by a group of boys from his school.”
CHAPTER 34
Angie’s news appeared to physically punch Claire in the stomach. The young woman doubled over and slumped down onto a moss-covered log, her features slack.
“Who?” she whispered.“How?”
Angie lowered herself onto the wet fallen log beside Claire. She rubbed her face. There was no way she could put this genie back in the bottle now, not without being dishonest.
“It’s the story around town, among the older residents,” Angie said gently. “The police do know—I spoke with Constable Jacobi about it. His father was involved in investigating an aspect of the incident. It’s not my place to tell you, Claire, but you’ll probably hear it as gossip one day, and it’s not going to be nice any way you hear it. It’s also possible that what happened to your uncle Axel ties into what happened to Jasmine. At least in part.”
Because those boys would have bonded tightly over those terrible secrets as they became men, and I’m almost 100 percent certain they were the ones terrorizing Jasmine and the women along the river. And they might also have tried to send me into Carmanagh Lake.
Unless that had been Budge Hargreaves.
Or hunters with brake problems, but Angie was still leaning toward Darnell Jacobi having alerted Wallace and the twins to the fact she was driving a rental up to the lodge. Darnell Jacobi, who’d been at school with them all, and whose father had called off the investigation into the possible murder of Porter Bates.
She cleared her throat. “The story goes that shortly after Axel turned thirteen, a bully at his school, an older boy named Porter Bates, allegedly lured him out to a quarry north of town. Bates and his gang allegedly sexually assaulted Axel there. Bates and his guys had been bullying Axel for a long time before that from what I understand. Axel apparently never officially reported the sexual assault, but shortly afterward Porter Bates was jumped by some local guys on a secluded trail outside of town. These guys allegedly bound him up and drowned him at the quarry. The feeling is that this was done in retaliation for what Porter did to Axel.”
“Murder?Who ... who were the guys who jumped Porter?”
“I don’t know.”
Claire looked as though she was going to throw up. “Not Axel’s brothers?” she said. “Surely not the twins—my uncles—and my dad?”
“Porter’s body was never found, Claire, and no one confessed to anything. It became a missing persons case that grew cold.”
“Isthiswhy you were asking Budge about the Jacobis? About them dropping cases?”
“I’m trying to get a sense of where allegiances lie, yes, and how far people might go to ... avenge things.” Angie was treading very close to Claire’s father’s affair now, and she did not want to be the one to reveal that.
“So what, exactly, does all this have to do with Jasmine Gulati’s drowning?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything if the past speaks to patterns of behavior and MO. Even if past events do speak to patterns of behavior, it still might bear no direct relevance to her accident, but I need to ask the questions. Jasmine did anger a lot of people in town. Maybe someone wanted revenge.”
“So they pushed her in? Is that what you think?”
Angie gave a half shrug. “Maybe. Some of the people she angered also had opportunity and means. And some of their stories don’t add up, for whatever reason.”
Claire swore softly, looked away, then said, “I don’t know whether I should help you. These are my people you’re investigating.”
“That’s up to you, Claire. Up to your own conscience.”
“What about the other guys who allegedly assaulted Uncle Axel?”
“Again, nothing was officially reported or proved.”
“So they’re out there, maybe? Just walking around while my uncle suffers?”
“I don’t know.”
She rubbed her knee. “What do you want to ask my uncle?”
“If he saw anything on the river twenty-four years ago and what he remembers of an altercation with Jasmine Gulati in the Hook and Gaffe. He worked there at the time. There is footage of him watching the argument, among others.”
Claire opened her mouth, but Angie raised her hand. “Before you say this gives you even more reason not to take me to Axel’s place, I promise I will go easy on him. Like I told you, I worked in sex crimes for over six years.” She paused, holding Claire’s eyes. “I understand the pain, the shame, the confusion, the anger around being a survivor of those kinds of crimes. If anyone wants to do right by a sexual assault survivor, it’s me, Claire. I need you to understand that.”
